2024-04-01 10:16:28
No, it’s not the film about pastéis de nata. This is the Oscar winner.”Poor Things” where the protagonist eats dozens of creams and Carminho sings a fado.
This film is Portuguese because it has the two most successful Portuguese actors since Carmen Miranda in American cinema: Joaquim de Almeida and Daniela Melchior.
Yes, people are already saying that Daniela Ruah, who I don’t know what… Yes, Daniela Ruah has been around California for many years but her thing is series and not cinema.
Anyway, I’m the one writing this and I’ll say whatever I want.
This film has Daniela Melchior in the main female role and Joaquim de Almeida in a bad-ass role, in which the Portuguese has great experience.
“Road House” is a production by Doug Liman inspired by the 1989 film of the same name. Interestingly, Joel Silver produces the 2024 version, as happened with the original, which featured Patrick Swayze in the main role. The first became a cult film, being the most watched feature film on American television in 2020. A sequel, “Road House 2”, was launched in 2006 but no one gave it a card.
This new take on the story begins with Dalton giving and receiving beatings. He is a former martial arts champion, recruited by the owner of a Florida beachfront bar. The place is called Road House and is regularly ravaged by bandits who apparently work for Brandt, the son of a powerful local notable who manages his father’s affairs while he serves a prison sentence.
Initially disinterested, Dalton increasingly invests himself in his work as a security guard, using unorthodox methods, but with a strong sense of justice and compassion, which leads him to meet the beautiful doctor Ellie.
To do remakes of cult films is always a complicated challenge that requires as much courage as Dalton’s. The character played by Jake Gyllenhaal is a combat specialist who, even so, does his best to avoid getting into trouble.
This aspect of the main character was maintained. The almost mystical dimension of the first “Road House” was in the fact that the hero was passionate about meditation, while now he is the victim of a drama that marked him and that leads him to have suicidal impulses.
Jake Gyllenhaal followed a draconian bodybuilding program, and the director never misses the opportunity to film his abs like Cristiano Ronaldo. And the character that the actor plays really needs to be the equivalent of CR7: the script leads him to face a villain called Knox, played by a true champion of the MMA ring, the Irishman Conor McGregor.
Daniela Melchior has what will be the most important role of her career so far and fulfills everything that is required of her and expected of her as an actress.
She is the first to admit that the chemistry between the protagonists was good. In several interviews she explained that the first time she spoke to Gyllenhaal was via Zoom and that, right then, they read the scenes they had together. “The director and the producer believed that we would marry very well. When I met him in person, it was a confirmation of what I had already seen in this Zoom session”, explained Daniela Melchior, who really enjoyed working with Jake Gyllenhaal: “He is a very sweet, loving, calm person. At the same time, he is an actor who thinks a lot about things in a positive way. I entered the project admiring it immensely and left the project admiring it even more.”
The Portuguese woman is not involved, like all the women in the film, in fight scenes that represent a good part of the two hours of “Road House”. But there are also moments of humor, like the scene in which Dalton accompanies opponents whose bones have just been broken into pieces to the hospital (where he meets Ellie), or with Brandt’s character, a gangster crazy man who shaves with a razor in the Atlantic Ocean with rough seas.
The film will certainly be a success, despite not being this scribe’s cup of tea. You can see it now at streaming on Prime Video, much to the consternation of the director’s director, Doug Liman, who publicly distanced himself from the release of his own feature film. Liman claims the studio promised him that “Road House” would be released in theaters, and since it was known that its distribution would be limited to streaming has declared that he was deceived.
“Road House” by Doug Lima, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Daniela Melchior, Conor McGregor, Joaquim de Almeida, JD Pardo, Arturo Castro and Billy Magnussen.
2024-04-01 10:16:28